Re: cr> Various resources

1996-04-01

Sender: •••@••.•••

On Mar 31, 18:37, Cyber Rights wrote:
> NorthStar has an article about a secret "dirty word list" that AOL
> uses to censor postings.  According to the author, people's postings
> get deleted for unknown reasons and no one can make AOL say what its
> policy is.  Email me if you would like the article.

This is true.  However, there's a Web site which allegedly claims
to have a copy of this list, and has posted it for public consumption:

http://www.cloud9.net/~jegelhof/

There are a whole slew of nasty rumors surrounding what AOL's done
to users in the past.  Back in January, a whole bunch of poets got
TOSed or kicked off the service for using objectionable language
-- and some postings were removed without even a notice to the
author.  One of these poems used the word "breast" (this was shortly
before various breast cancer survivors embarrased the hell out of
AOL for banning that word).  Details are available at:

http://www.motley-focus.com/~timber/aol.html

Further rumors and innuendo can be found in the alt.aol-sucks
FAQ, on alt.answers.

And finally (for those who care), I've steg'd ZIPped copies of both
the Obscenity Guidelines, and one of the banned poems in two
graphics I produced for "24 Hours in Democracy".  Steganography
is basically hiding data in other things -- in this case, JPEGs.
Head over to the Cypherpunks archive (http://www.suunyside.com/cypherpunks/),
and pick up the JPEG v4 source and the jpeg-jsteg diff patch if you're
really bored and curious.  The graphics are at:

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~hwh6k/public/hope.html
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~hwh6k/public/artists-know.html

The data is steg'd in the smaller versions of each graphic.

-H

P.S. A cursory search of the AOL server turns up NOTHING on either
     the Obscenity Guidelines, or their Terms of Service.  Somehow,
     I'm not surprised.

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